‘What have you been up to?’ he asks, gently unpinning the sling and checking the girl’s swollen wrist.
‘I fell off the beam,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t concentrating.’ ‘The trials are in three weeks,’ says her father, gripping her good hand.
‘Trials?’
‘She’s the next Comăneci – that’s what everyone’s saying. Is it broken?’
‘We’ll need an X-ray,’ says Erich, ‘but it looks like a sprain, at this stage, rather than a break.’
‘That’s good,’ says the girl.
‘Good?’ says the man, who may not be her father after all. ‘Good?’
Erich pins up the sling again. ‘Let’s just wait for the X-ray.’
He sees her on television some months later, competing at the Moscow Olympics; she flips and coils across the screen, as supple as a fish.
‘Papa, Mama, watch us,’ cry Karin and Steffi as they dance around the living room, vaulting over chairs and balancing on tiptoes. The girl who looks like Sieglinde is making her final dismount, pausing for a split second to steady herself when she lands, and Erich is back in Berlin: he and Siggi are scaling the rubble piles, daring one another to climb higher, higher, and Frau Hummel is calling you’ll break your necks, you’ll kill yourselves – but when they jump it feels like flying.
He does not tell his wife and daughters that he treated the girl on the television, and as the footage replays she really is Sieglinde, whole and undamaged, leaping through the years to him. She twists in slow motion, a bright souvenir he has never let go. He thinks of his grandfather’s wooden hives, the carved likeness of Luise, Opa Kröning’s first love. We fashion simulacra of those we have lost and keep them as charms against time; we fill them with swarms of memory, clear-winged and sweet.
Karin and Steffi are bowing now and Bettina is applauding.
‘How many points?’ they ask. ‘Who wins?’
‘It’s a draw,’ says Erich.
‘We couldn’t possibly decide,’ says Bettina.
They have their mother’s auburn hair and pale complexion; he sees nothing of himself in them, though every now and then Bettina identifies certain mannerisms that come from the Kröning side: the way Steffi laughs, the way Karin tilts her head.
‘You forget,’ Erich tells her, ‘I’m not really a Kröning.’
‘And thank God for that,’ says Bettina.
She has met Erich’s mother only once, on their wedding day, and refuses to allow the girls to visit her. That woman, she calls her. That Nazi. Erich does not argue.
In the evening, when Karin and Steffi are cleaning their teeth and putting on their pyjamas, Bettina says, ‘The next Olympics are in Los Angeles.’
‘Oh?’ says Erich. The news is droning away on the television: this foreign dignitary visited that factory, which has far exceeded its target output; this local dignitary opened that new block of flats, which will offer families in Marzahn a modern and cheerful home.
‘That’s how we do it, comrade. We train the girls up to Olympic standard and accompany them as their coaches.’
He knows she is joking; it’s one of their games, devising ways to escape across the border. All the same, he motions to her to keep her voice down – even in their own home, even in their bed, someone could be listening. Best to speak in code or over rushing water; best to tune the radio to nothing. Once, years ago at a student café, he noticed a woman at the next table making notes while he and Bettina, tipsy on birthday Rotkäppchen, sketched their plans in the air: a giant catapult made from rubber bands, a jetpack powered by pickled onions, a pair of telescopic stilts. And occasionally, too, he has noticed a click on the telephone, a man shadowing him in the street or watching from a doorway: it is hard to be alone here.
When Karin and Steffi are in bed they ask Erich for a story. He recalls for a moment the one his grandmother told him about the castle with the murder hole and the stumbling steps, the narrow notches from which arrows flew like curses, the many ways of keeping people out – but instead he tells them this:
There was once a boy who kept a fish in the bathtub – a carp he bought with his mother at the market. At first it seemed the same as any other fish, but although the boy did not feed it, it grew by the day, and soon it was so big that it could not turn around, and then it was so big that it filled the entire tub. Its scales were great silver coins and its tail jutted from the water like the fan of a Spanish lady. The boy’s mother seemed afraid of the fish and stood at the bathroom door and would not enter. Normally nothing could frighten her, neither the lightning that tore through the sky in summer, nor the headless hens that for a few bloody moments survived the fall of her axe, nor even the stories of children bricked up behind walls. But the eyes of the fish were as fat as the candles she lit under the teapot, and in certain lights she said she glimpsed a flame in them also, something wise or something wicked; it was not clear which.
‘What are we going to do with this monster?’ she asked. Plainly the fish could not stay; by now its gills rose above the water whenever it tried to move, cuts that would not heal.
‘We could take him to the lake,’ said the boy.
‘Yes,’ said his mother. ‘Yes, that is what we’ll do.’
Already she seemed less afraid, but the boy’s father said, ‘The lake is frozen.’ And the boy and his mother looked at each other – it was December, of course! How had they forgotten the winter?
That night the boy could not sleep. He thought he could hear the fish gasping, but told himself it was just the wind shifting in the pine trees, pouring in and out of the mouths of the wooden hives. He opened the shutters and lay looking at the night, the frost casting its crooked spines across the windowpane. At some dark hour – he did not know when – he awoke and saw yellow lights moving in the distance, and he thought of a story he’d read about a little bird who mistakes a wolf’s eyes for friendly lanterns. No, he told himself. No, the lights were not the eyes of something untamed and vicious approaching the house, but simply passing travellers finding their way. He closed the shutters and fell asleep, and his dreams were as light as the mists that ringed the lake on winter mornings, and when dawn came he knew how he could save the carp. He took his father to the lake – it was not far away – and walked out on the ice, carrying candles to the frozen centre, where the water was deepest. He had made them himself from beeswax: stubby little nuggets that would not take long to burn down. He had to go alone, as the ice would not hold his father’s weight, and with every step he listened for cracks, for the sound of distant, broken bells that called out cold disaster. When he reached the centre he lit the candles, placed them in a ring, then stepped back and waited.
‘Is all well?’ cried his father.
‘All is well,’ cried the boy, the words a jumbled echo. Before him the candles began to tilt and to topple, to sink into the ice like suns until they vanished beneath the white horizon, and he took his chisel and gouged an opening, following the ring made by the flames. He and his father returned home then, and together they lifted the fish onto the back of the hay wagon. His mother watched from a distance, pacing, lacing and unlacing her fingers.
‘Don’t hurt yourselves,’ she warned. ‘It’s too heavy, you’ll injure yourselves. You should kill it instead, kill it and eat it. Yes, that would be for the best. Look at its teeth. It means you harm.’
But the boy and his father readied their horse and jumped into the wagon, and the boy sat on the back of the fish while his father urged the horse to run faster, faster, and beneath the boy the great cold creature opened and closed its mouth and thrashed its tail. When they reached the lake it began to buck and writhe, and the boy and his father lifted it from the wagon and pushed it out across the frozen surface. It seemed to sense the opening in the ice and slid towards it, the boy following behind and giving it a push when it started to slow. A few metres from the hole he gave it one last shove, and it slipped away from him and disappeared into the water with barely a splash.
‘It’s gone,’ said his father.
And she began to weep.
Over the next few weeks the boy returned to the lake each day, watching as the hole in the ice grew smaller and smaller, a cold fontanelle. In his dreams he dropped beneath it, and the carp caught him on its back and took him down to its silty bed, where things lay buried and forgotten, and when he looked up he saw the ice sky was as thick as winter, and he knew he would never go home.
1994
Berlin
They found the bomb when the river fell one dry summer; little by little it showed its hunched back above the silt. It made headlines, this unfinished business, this rusting grudge, and everyone within its imagined reach had to evacuate. Officials checked the streets fanning out from its dark centre, looking in restaurants and flats, libraries and offices, banks and schools for anybody flouting the order to withdraw: It’s for your own safety, madam, sir. Pack a few things – you may need to sleep elsewhere.
‘They’re always digging up something,’ said the man sitting next to Sieglinde on the bus. ‘It’s probably a dud.’
He must have been in his seventies, a little older than Sieglinde, and she found herself thinking the question that everybody thought from time to time around such men: What did you do? On her lap she held an overnight bag containing the essentials for this small evacuation fifty years distant but too close to home.
As the bus drove by the great concrete cylinder on Dudenstrasse – twelve thousand tonnes of proof that the ground in Berlin could not hold a triumphal arch – the man said, ‘I was here at the end. There was nothing left to fight with, but we would have done anything for him. Ja, ja. We would have died for him.’
The other passengers shifted in their seats, coughed, stared out the windows. Neat trees, green squares, unharmed buildings – or at least, so carefully mended you could not tell. It was a different story in the east of the city, in places, but that was being fixed now too: façades restored, cracks plastered over. When Jonathan’s nephews and nieces had visited from England, Sieglinde had taken them on trips to Mitte and Friedrichshain, showing them the shrapnel marks and the bullet holes, the houses that still stood open to the sky. She tried to convey to them the extent of the ruin: hundreds of air raids, tens of thousands dead, a third of all homes destroyed. She should have told them instead of the hands and faces smeared with mortar dust; the men who came with stolen watches glinting like rows of moons on their arms; a boy with yellow hair who helped her to her feet and wrapped her in velvet and fur. I saw them riding on her shoulders for decades, these constant ghosts, testing whether she could bear their weight. How long should we bow to the memory of damage?
‘All this nonsense,’ said the man. ‘It’s been in the Spree for fifty years.’
Sieglinde nodded, keeping her eyes on her overnight bag. She had seen the stories about other bombs that had surfaced, ploughed up by farmers, exhumed on building sites, caught in fishing nets. A road worker died when his digger struck a mine; a boy lost his hand to a grenade he found in the forest. Fifty years meant nothing: these things were still live.
‘Such a performance,’ said the man. ‘I’m supposed to be taking my grandson to the zoo. It’s his birthday.’
Sieglinde nodded again and listed the contents of her overnight bag to herself: one hairbrush, one toothbrush, one tube of toothpaste, one nightdress, one change of clothes, two crossword puzzle books, two cheese sandwiches, an orange, a chocolate bar, a pencil. I have everything I need, she told herself. Here in my lap, right here. I haven’t forgotten anything.
‘Things were simpler before the Wall came down,’ the man went on. ‘I can’t get from A to B. All this digging.’
Sieglinde did not look at the news that night. The all-clear had been given; she was back home, and in the two-faced city everything had returned to normal. There was no need to watch the footage of the abandoned streets, the empty schools, the shuttered windows, no need to witness the detonation, fire bursting from water, nor hear the applause of the men who stood back and cheered as if it were New Year’s Eve. Instead, she sat and thought about the call that had come from the Federal Commissioner: they were assembling a team to work out of an office down near Nuremberg, reconstructing the torn Stasi files. Sixteen thousand sacks, six hundred million scraps of paper. Sieglinde had not responded at first when they asked for expressions of interest; she would have to move away from Berlin, away from her job at the archives and the life she had built with Jonathan. But now – now she thought: I could do that. I would be good at that. Jonathan used to tease her about her endless crosswords and the way she managed to shut out all distractions when she worked on them. Sometimes he wrote extra clues in the margins when she wasn’t looking – five across: name of man you married (8) – or underlined certain words in the dictionaries she kept in every room. Antisocial. Obsessive. He never interfered with the jigsaws that crept across the dining table, though, and took care not to disrupt the little pieces arranged according to colour around the fragmentary alps, sailing ships, waterfalls. She had a knack for it, he admitted: a peculiar ability to lock the sky together, to build a forest from so many scraps of green and black. Sieglinde had thought she would have a good twenty years of retirement with him, going to the Philharmonic and the Staatsoper, visiting the places on the jigsaw boxes. You need to pack up his things, her friends told her. You’ll feel better once you’ve done it. Then you can move on with your life.
She opened Jonathan’s cupboards and drawers and began to sort his belongings into boxes; she had been putting it off for months, but now she cleared the bedside cabinet of his bottles of pills, removed his coat from its hook, threw away his toothbrush and his soap. You have to start somewhere, her friends said. An hour or two and it’s over. At least he didn’t suffer; at least it was sudden. A heart attack at home: that was the best way to go, wasn’t it? At the back of a cupboard she found his old artificial foot – the one he had worn when they met at the Ballhaus Resi some forty years earlier. Almost real, it gleamed in the half-light, cool and silky beneath her fingers. Softly she closed the door.
The next day she applied to join the reconstruction team. Perhaps a change of scene was what she needed; she could sublet her apartment, pack away anything precious – and besides, it would only be for the next couple of years, until she retired. There were puzzles to solve; there was blame to lay. Six hundred million pieces of it.
It must be very exciting, her friends said when they phoned to see how she was getting on. You must be finding out all sorts of things. I can’t talk about it, said Sieglinde. We have to sign a gag order. Of course, they said, of course; it’s highly sensitive information. There was a pause on the line. It is, Sieglinde agreed. Highly sensitive. Another pause. Well, then.
It was true that some of her colleagues were handling material on foreign espionage or the doping of young athletes or the Baader-Meinhof Group – but Sieglinde’s friends would be very disappointed if they could read her files. M. has long straight hair, greying at the temples, and appears older than her age. She habitually wears a red knitted cap, and her favourite item of jewellery is a short string of yellow beads (probably plastic). W. frequents a public house on the corner of Tieck-and Novalisstrasse, where he typically situates himself at the table nearest the door and plays chess with other regulars. In terms of personality, F. appears reserved, polite, able to be influenced. Don’t you want something a bit racier? her colleagues asked. Not at all, she said. I’m happy with my ordinary people. What she did not say was that every day she looked among the ordinary people for him, for Erich. So many times his name seemed to materialise in her hands – er and ich, ich and er, right there in black and white – but they were common words, of course, he and I, I and he, and the name was a common name. And even though she never could piece him back together, still she found satisfaction in the daily sorting of the scraps; a hypnotic peace. You are doing important work
, the director said at their staff meetings, and so did the journalists who wrote stories about the reconstruction project. There was even a picture of Sieglinde in a Spiegel article with a caption that said as much: she was sitting at her desk, piles of torn paper surrounding her, a serious look on her face. Don’t smile, the photographer had said. And can we add some more paper? It doesn’t look authentic enough.
1995
Leipzig
It was only after Bettina had gone that Karin and Steffi began to ask Erich about his birth family. There wasn’t much he could tell them: he was born in Poland, then brought to Germany as an orphan and adopted by the Krönings. There must be records, though, they said. There must be traces. Can’t we ask Oma Kröning?
That woman. That Nazi. Since their mother’s death they had met their grandmother Emilie a handful of times, but she did not know who they were; memory was retreating from her, certain details blurring. Even when Erich visited, some days she did not recognise his face and did not know his name.
‘Gerhard?’ she said. ‘Christoph? Gustav? It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
‘This is Erich,’ said Tante Uschi. ‘He’s your son.’
‘No,’ said Mama, looking him up and down. ‘No, he’s Polish – but clearly he’s of German stock. That’s why he was chosen.’
Erich had read just how the choosing was done: children rounded up in the streets like stray dogs, lured with a bit of food, or snatched in the night from their homes, then transported to institutions to be tested and measured before being placed with German families. Piecemeal memories still returned to him: a woman in brown bending to offer him a slice of bread; the callipers at his skull and jaw and legs; a palette of eyes of different colours; the occasional word: Tatuś, kotek. But which mother whirled him around in the garden? And which family owned Anka, the black-and-white cat? He was no longer sure. Each time he visited the farmhouse he wanted to tell Tante Uschi that he wouldn’t be visiting again, but from the orchard he heard the hives repeating their jumbled stories and he felt his tongue turning to wood. You-you, you, called the turtle dove.
The Wish Child Page 26